Royal Poxes and Potions E-Book

Raymond Lamont-Brown

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Royal Poxes and Potions is a fascinating look at the relationship between monarchs and their doctors and reveals the complex and influential position that they held. Acclaimed biographer Raymond Lamont Brown casts light on a previously overlooked aspect of the monarchy and the secrets it conceals. From the instigation of the royal doctor in medieval times and up to the present day, the tales of secrets, murder, medical incompetence and revolutionary operations make compelling reading. Included here is Sir William Gull, court physician to Queen Victoria, who was a suspect in the Jack the Ripper case, and Sir Frederick Treves, who was not only court physician to the four succeeding monarchs, but was also the man who helped to rescue the Elephant Man, Joseph Merrick, from a fairground freak show.

Leseprobe

ROYAL

POXES & POTIONS

ROYAL

POXES & POTIONS

ROYAL DOCTORS & THEIR SECRETS

RAYMOND LAMONT-BROWN

Cover illustration: detail from The Death of HRH Albert, Prince Consort

by Oakley (Wellcome Institute Library, London)

First published in 2001

This edition first published in 2009

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2011

All rights reserved

© Raymond Lamont-Brown, 2001, 2002, 2009 2011

The right of Raymond Lamont-Brown, to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

EPUB ISBN 978 0 7524 7390 1

MOBI ISBN 978 0 7524 7389 5

Original typesetting by The History Press

CONTENTS

Chronology of Court Medical Practitioners

Prologue: The King is Dead, Long Live his Doctors

Introduction

PART ONE: ROYAL PROGRESS

1. Learning from the Greats: steps towards the throne

2. ‘A Throng of the Killing Profession’: royal doctors under scrutiny

3. ‘Toads with their poison, Doctors with their drug’: physicians at Scotland’s courts, 1568–1853

4. To Serve the ‘Kings over the Water’: royal doctors of Jacobite sympathy

5. The Prisoner at Windsor: George III and his royal doctors

6. Assassination Attempt at St James’s: royal doctors and the Duke of Cumberland

7. Prinny’s Physicians Extraordinary: court roles for distinguished and shady medics

8. William the Sailor King: royal doctors understate a death

PART TWO: PROFESSIONAL EMINENCE

9. Science, Style and Squeamishness: Queen Victoria’s early medical households

10. Wilful Murder against Buckingham Palace: the rise, fall and rise of Sir James Clark

11. Trials of an Uncrowned King: Prince Albert and the royal doctors

12. Battles and Blackmail at Balmoral: royal doctors and the Highland retreat

13. Secrets of a Royal Doctor: the consultations of Sir James Reid

14. Whitechapel Whispers: the curious low life of Dr Sir William Gull

15. Anxiety at the Court of Edward VII: an operation makes history

16. Edwardian Doctor Extraordinary: monsters, scandals and Sir Frederick Treves

17. ‘English Physicians kill you . . .’: the medical households of George V and Queen Mary

18. The Dark Side of a King: Edward VIII as king and in exile

19. The Little Prince the Nation Forgot: Dr Manby draws the curtain

20. George VI and the King-sized Killer

Epilogue: Towards a Modern Practice

Appendix: Royal Mortality

Glossary

Notes

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

CHRONOLOGY OF COURT MEDICAL PRACTITIONERS

3200–2980 BC

Ancient Egyptian rulers begin to have personal physicians.

2563–2423 BC

Women royal doctors at Ancient Egyptian courts.

460–355 BC

Hippocrates of Cos leads the custom of having physicians at Greek courts.

46 BC

Medical men employed on ad hoc basis in the cadres of Imperial Rome.

131–200 AD

Galen court physician to Emperor Marcus Aurelius; court physicians now have distinctive roles.

766–809

Abbasid Caliph Harun Al-Rachid promotes court physicians.

1042–66

Baldwin, Abbot of Bury St Edmunds, first physician mentioned at court of Edward the Confessor.

1066–87

Brother Nigel; first mention of court physician on a payroll of William the Conqueror.

1216–72

Court rolls began to detail rights, duties and status of royal physicians.

First knighthoods recorded for medical court service.

Henry III establishes a separate medical household for his queen.

1272–1307

Edward I encourages royal doctors to take an interest in military medicine.

1461

Pool of doctors at Edward IV’s court, covering many nationalities.

[1462

Barber-surgeons of London granted a charter.]

1474

New Ordinances established, defining duties of royal doctors at English court.

1500s

Andreas Vesalius and Ambroise Paré role-models for court physicians.

[1506

Guild of Surgeons and Barbers, at Edinburgh, incorporated by town council and ratified by James IV.]

James IV encourages royal doctors in Scotland to give care to patients outside the court, thus forming a prototype of a national health service.

[1518

Henry VIII grants charter for the foundation of the Royal College of Physicians of London.] A new generation of physicians and surgeons join royal court.

[1540

Surgeons join with Barbers to form United Company of Barber-Surgeons.]

First Master of the United Company of Barber-Surgeons is Thomas Vicary, promoted to sergeant-surgeon at royal court.

1544

Antoine Brisset first Scottish court doctor to be mentioned as military surgeon.

1560s

Dr John Dee vacillates at Queen Elizabeth I’s court; he is dubbed ‘Queen Elizabeth’s Merlin’.

1587

Royal doctors benefit from will of executed Mary, Queen of Scots; a rare public record.

1594

Royal physician Roderigo López executed at Tyburn for plotting Queen Elizabeth I’s assassination.

[1599

Faculty of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow chartered.]

[1617

Worshipful Society of Apothecaries of London chartered by James VI & I.]

1628

Physician-in-extraordinary William Harvey demonstrates circulation of the blood.

[1657

Fraternity of Apothecaries founded at Edinburgh.]

1660

Richard Wiseman, ‘the Father of English Surgery’, appointed surgeon-in-ordinary to Charles II. Describes the ‘King’s Evil’ (scrofula).

[1667

Royal College of Physicians founded in Ireland.]

[1681

Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh chartered.]

1685

Charles II is purported to have been murdered by royal doctors in a case of ‘iatrogenic regicide’.

[1694

College of Surgeons of Edinburgh chartered.]

1714

Sir David Hamilton accused by fellow royal physicians of hastening the death of Queen Anne.

1735

Sir Caesar Hawkins becomes sergeant-surgeon to George II. Dubbed quintessential eccentric court physician.

1753

Royal doctor Archibald Cameron executed at Tyburn, the last Jacobite to be hanged, drawn and quartered.

[1778

Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh chartered.]

1788

Onset of George III’s descent to madness and the unprecedented domestic and political prominence of royal doctors at court.

Dr Francis Willis, for the first time ever, breaks royal protocol to treat the monarch.

1819

Queen Victoria vaccinated against smallpox; the first member of the royal family to be so treated.

1822

George IV’s physician Sir William Knighton dubbed ‘the king’s spy’.

[1832

Foundation of the British Medical Association.]

1837

Accusations abound that royal doctors’ bulletins on William IV’s last days were ‘manipulated’ for electoral advantage by Viscount Melbourne, Liberal prime minister.

1839

Royal doctor Sir James Clark and Queen Victoria involved in the ‘Lady Florence Hastings case’.

1844

The office of HM First Physician in Scotland lapses.

1853

Sir James Clark invites Dr John Snow to give Queen Victoria chloroform at the birth of Prince Leopold.

1861

Erstwhile foreign secretary, George William Frederick Villiers, 4th Earl of Clarendon, publicly criticises royal doctors for death of Prince Albert.

1871

Joseph Lister operates for the first time on Queen Victoria. The queen witnesses Lister’s innovative expertise. He had introduced antiseptic surgery in 1867.

1896

Chicago medical practitioner Dr Howard avers royal doctor Sir William Gull is ‘Jack the Ripper’.

1899

Queen Victoria draws up new ‘Regulations’ of service for married royal doctors.

1901

Sir James Reid carries out Queen Victoria’s ‘secret’ funerary instructions. He hides John Brown artefacts in the royal coffin.

1902

Sir Frederick Treves operates on Edward VII for appendicitis.

Sir James Reid negotiates ‘blackmail’ letters concerning John Brown and Queen Victoria from royal physician Dr Profeit’s son George.

1928

George V undergoes operation on the chest by surgeon-in-ordinary Sir Hugh Ripley. A further operation is carried out by Wilfred Batten Lewis Trotter.

[1929

Foundation of the (Royal) College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists.]

[1948

National Health Service comes into operation.]

1949

Sir James Paterson Ross performs a right lumbar sympathectomy of George VI.

1951

A pneumonectomy performed on George VI at Buckingham Palace by royal surgeon Sir Clement Price-Thomas.

[1952

Foundation of the (Royal) College of General Practitioners.]

1953

Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother elected to Honorary Fellowship of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

1961

Effective hip replacement operations become common; Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother has hip replacements at set times.

[1962

New Designation: Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow.]

1964

Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother attends the King Edward VII Hospital for Officers for appendix operation.

1966

Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother has emergency abdominal operation. Details not announced, leading to lurid speculations.

[1967

Opening of Lister Institute, Edinburgh.]

[1971

Royal College of Surgeons reports cigarette smoking kills some 27,500 people a year in Britain. Historians dub lung cancer ‘royal killer’.]

1972

Prince Philip incapacitated by yellow jaundice; attended by royal doctors Sir John Weir and Sir Harold Evans.

[1978

Smallpox is declared eradicated.]

1984

National press agog when Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother has surgery under general anaesthetic for removal of fishbone from throat.

1986

Report in press that euthanasia was carried out on George V by royal physician Lord Dawson of Penn.

2000

The late Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother breaks collar-bone in 100th year.

2001

The late Princess Margaret admitted to King Edward VII’s Hospital for Officers for observation.

9 Feb 2002

Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon (b.1930) died following cardiac problems at King Edward VII Hospital, London.

30 March 2002

Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother died at Royal Lodge in her 102th year.

February 2004

Appointment of Dr Timothy Evans as a royal physician causing ‘quite a stir’ because of his practises of ‘alternative medicine’. He replaced Sir Nigel Southward who retired after 28 years of service.

29 April 2007

Death of Sir George Pinker (b.1924), Surgeon Gynaecologist to Queen Elizabeth II. He supervised nine royal births.

2008

Professor John Cunningham, Head of the Medical Household and Physician to Queen Elizabeth II, receives CVO.

PROLOGUE

THE KING IS DEAD, LONG LIVE HIS DOCTORS

Some said it was the most cynical act ever in the history of the British monarchy. Others declared it was royal murder. A few opined that the reported act of euthanasia had preserved the dignity of the sovereign. Today the evidence surrounding the last hours of the life of King George V is conflicting. Dictionaries of quotations contain the moving words written in first draft by physician-in-ordinary Bertrand Edward, Viscount Dawson of Penn (1864–1945), on a menu card in the royal household dining-room at Sandringham House, where the king lay dying. The simple message read: ‘The King’s life is moving peacefully towards its close.’1

Yet cynicism dripped from the words for some when they were told that King George’s death had been hastened for the convenience of the assembled media. It was considered undignified in the royal household for the monarch’s death to be first carried in the lightweight evening tabloids. So, the truth came out that Lord Dawson had chemically shortened the monarch’s life by a few hours so that the heavyweight papers like The Times would be first to carry the king’s obituary. A lethal dose of morphia and cocaine was administered into the jugular vein and George V died at 11.55 p.m. on Monday, 20 January 1936.

The revelation about the king’s accelerated demise was first given a public airing in 1986 by Francis Watson, biographer of Lord Dawson. The consequent publicity surrounding the disclosure brought to the public eye once more the profoundly secret role of the royal doctor. While the Independent raised the question in the headline ‘Was George V’s death treason?’, others began to realise that the consultations of a royal physician must go further than matters that are strictly concerned with physical or mental illness, or with medical matters in general. After all, the royal physician’s patient is unique to the day and the hour. Historically, royal doctors may have been known to push a bad or senile monarch into eternity to fulfil the political need for a more suitable successor to the throne. But in modern terms the royal doctor’s role has added more facets, including contributing where possible to the enduring dignity of the monarchy. Yet there are others who believe that royal doctors have always been employed for more sinister roles.

In recent times, for example, crime historians have opined that George V was ‘murdered’ to seal secrets that would, as Christabel, Lady Aberconway, vouchsafed to writer Michael Thornton, ‘still cause the Throne to totter’.2 In the research for his book The Ripper and The Royals, Melvyn Fairclough noted how Bernard Fitzalan-Howard, 16th Duke of Norfolk, Earl Marshal of England, and Hugh Montague, 1st Viscount Trenchard, Commissioner for the Metropolitan Police from 1931 to 1935, had separately and independently told influential artist Walter Sickert that George V’s death had been hastened to silence him.3

The reason had been known for years by royal doctors who had colluded, averred courtiers, in a startling and hardly believable secret. For years certain royal biographers have suggested that King George V’s elder brother, the mentally unstable Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence and Avondale, was a key player in the ‘Jack the Ripper’ murders, and that he had not died of pneumonia in 1892, but had survived until 1933 to be ‘incarcerated at Glamis [castle]’.4 Thus the prince’s funeral and elaborate tomb by Sir Alfred Gilbert in the Albert Chapel at Windsor Castle remain an elaborate sham. George V had thus reigned unconstitutionally – and his remorse for his brother’s illegal detention had been feverishly shouted out from his deathbed while he was mortally ill. To prevent the royal secret from spreading, Lord Dawson was used as the instrument of silence. As with many such rumours, its very implausibility has led to its durability.

Rather than be privy to burdensome royal secrets and responsibilities, and despite the glittering prizes to be garnered from such service, several prominent medics have declined royal preferment – often for extremely idiosyncratic reasons. The distinguished physician and Gulstonian lecturer Baldwin Hamey Jr (1600–76) turned down the post of royal physician (and a knighthood) because he did not approve of King Charles II’s morals.5 Another physician, Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802), refused George III’s blandishments, telling the monarch that he was intent on putting all his non-professional efforts into pursuing a rich widow who was already being wooed by others.6 Sir Henry Wentworth Acland (1815–1900), on the other hand, refused twice to be Queen Victoria’s physician because he thought he could do better for himself (and humanity) in academe.7

In the lengthy and still-evolving history of royal doctors, many have given loyal service, others have feathered their own nests, while some have been out and out mountebanks. One of the latter was John Radcliffe (1652–1714).8 A Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford, Radcliffe practised medicine in that city and then transferred to London, where his expertise earned him ‘twenty guineas a day’, an incredible amount for that era.9 His irascibility and undiplomatic outbursts made him many enemies. At the early age of 36, he was appointed physician to Princess Anne Sophia of Denmark (daughter of King Frederick III of Denmark), but was subsequently dismissed as he failed to turn up when she summoned him for consultations. Radcliffe was called to minister to Queen Mary II when she developed smallpox – and many blamed his supposed negligence for the queen’s death on 28 December 1694.

King William III called in Radcliffe when he developed oedema of the legs, but was aghast at the physician’s insulting behaviour to his condition. Radcliffe was never called to his court again. When Queen Anne fell ill, however, for the last time in 1714, Radcliffe refused to attend her and was much criticised for his attitude. In mitigation Radcliffe was ill himself – he died some three months after Queen Anne – but his name was in bad odour at court for many years.10

Other doctors, in contrast, were to win the serious respect, confidence and affection of their sovereigns. For instance, King George IV, while Prince of Wales, was moved to write to his physician-in-ordinary, Sir Walter Farquhar (1738–1819), in 1800, from Carlton House, ‘I place my whole and entire confidence in you’.11 Similarly, in a note accompanying a silver epergne [ornamental table centrepiece], George wrote: ‘Let me entreat your acceptance of the case which accompanies this note as a testimony of the true and high regard of your very sincere friend.’12

Queen Victoria saw the comings and goings of many physicians and surgeons during her long life and reign. Honours were bestowed and presents given to a multitude of medics. More favoured doctors were given a wide range of gifts by members of the royal family and Sir James Reid (1849–1923), who had been appointed resident medical attendant to Queen Victoria in 1881, reported in his journal in 1889 ‘a pretty good haul this Christmas’.13 Sir James Clark (1788–1870), physician-in-ordinary to Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, did even better. Clark had been resident physician to the Duchess of Kent, Queen Victoria’s mother, since 1835, and on his retirement in 1860 the queen gifted him the Tudor-Gothic house of Bagshot Park in Surrey, erstwhile home of her cousin Prince William Frederick, Duke of Gloucester and Edinburgh. The queen often visited this ‘grace and favour residence’, which gave the old physician much pleasure; he lived there until his death.14

In more modern times, King George VI hurried to the bedside of his dying physician Sir Maurice Cassidy (1880–1949) to bid him farewell, thank him for past devotion and confer on him the insignia of the Knight Grand Cross of the Victorian Order.15

As with any other royal appointment that of royal physician brought its frustrations, embarrassments and confusions – and in some cases the premature death of the appointee through stress. This was the fate of the famous royal accoucheur Sir Richard Croft (1762–1818). On 2 May 1816 Princess Charlotte Augusta of Wales, born at Carlton House on 7 January 1796, the only child of George, Prince of Wales, and Princess Caroline of Brunswick, married Prince Leopold George Frederick of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, Duke of Saxony. Following two miscarriages the princess fell pregnant again and a child was expected any time after 19 October 1817. The court and people awaited the birth with interest but as the days passed and no baby appeared Croft and his colleague Matthew Baillie (1766–1823), former physician to George III, adopted the quite new procedure of issuing an official statement on the royal health:

Claremont, 22 October: Her Royal Highness has occasionally suffered a little from headache, for which it has been necessary, at different times, to extract blood. On one occasion Her Royal Highness submitted to four incisions in the arm without effect in consequence of the veins being deeply buried. On a consultation of the Physicians and Surgeons, it was deemed improper to make any further attempts, and the blood was ordered to be drawn from a vein at the back of the hand, where the operation has several times been successfully performed . . . with great relief to Her Royal Highness.16

At last Charlotte went into labour on 3 November and the distinguished personages, from Viscount Sidmouth, the home secretary, to Earl Bathurst, the secretary for war, who were required to attend the birth were assembled. Croft announced that proceedings were ‘in every way in as much forwardness as he would desire it’. Because of uterine inertia a still-born prince was produced. Within six hours of her delivery the princess herself was dead; modern medical thought avers that she died because of complications exacerbated by inherited porphyria.

Henry Brougham, 1st Lord Brougham and Vaux, the Whig lawyer and MP, reported that the whole kingdom had ‘feelings of the deepest sorrow’.17 Indeed the sense of loss was constitutionally shattering; Princess Charlotte was the only direct legitimate heir apparent to the throne. The medical profession was also shocked and perplexed at the event; it was the first time that a royal lady had been delivered by an accoucheur, and many sought a scapegoat. Sir Richard Croft was blamed for the tragedy with the accusation of ‘negligence and of mismanaging the confinement’; professional voices averred that he should have called in Dr John Sims, the third of the princess’s physicians, much earlier. The Prince of Wales considered that Croft was seriously maligned over the death and wrote:

His Royal Highness’s acknowledgement of the zealous care, and indefatigable attention manifest by Sir Richard Croft towards his beloved daughter during her late and eventful confinement; and to express His Royal Highness’s entire confidence in the medical skill and ability which he displayed, during the arduous and protracted labour, whereof the issue, under the will of Divine Providence has overwhelmed His Royal Highness with such deep affliction.18

As the months went by following the princess’s burial at St George’s Chapel, Windsor, Croft became more anxious and depressed. He was called out to a patient, one Mrs Thackeray, at 86 Wimpole Street, London, who was a cousin-in-law to the writer William Makepeace Thackeray. A female infant was safely delivered – but alas Mrs Thackeray died in labour. Now deeply depressed by the outcome at Wimpole Street and reliving the traumas of Princess Charlotte’s deathbed, Croft excused himself, retired to a small bedroom that had been set aside for his use, and shot himself.19

By and large the appointment of royal doctors has been achieved by the personal recommendation of senior doctors, either to the monarchs directly or to their advisers. An example of the former procedure is seen in the appointment of Dr Joseph Lister (1827–1912). On 2 July 1870 Sir William Jenner (1815–98), president of the Royal College of Physicians and physician-in-ordinary to Queen Victoria, wrote to her thus:

Under all the conditions I am sure Your Majesty will do well as Your Majesty says to appoint an Edinburgh Surgeon. – There is a surgeon of the highest reputation in Edinburgh who succeeded [James] Syme [1799–1870] in his professorship (Mr. Lister formerly of Glasgow).20

From the reign of George III appointments of royal doctors were made with the agreement of government ministers, although at this date selection was considered a ‘family matter’. From Edward VII’s first court, suitable candidates have been selected by the current physician-in-ordinary. Today a certain reserve shrouds new appointments. A representative of the Lord Chamberlain’s office commented recently: ‘We do have our own selection procedure . . . and although not maintained in a document as such, is a matter of policy not made generally available.’21

To the historian, royal doctors of the twenty-first century are far less colourful than their predecessors. Formerly many ranked as spies, assassins, mountebanks, political shysters or money-grubbing non-entities. Over the centuries, such men formed an idiosyncratic and colourful branch of the medical profession. As royal illnesses frequently triggered political crises, actions by royal doctors had considerable effects on the nation. Their story is thus an important and largely untold one. It is a story that unfolds from the very early days of kingship.

INTRODUCTION

MAGIC, SIN AND SARACENS

Medical science as we have come to recognise it began in the Egypt of the pharaohs. Although influenced by the superstitions of magic in antiquity, the physicians and surgeons of Ancient Egypt achieved an international fame that was recognised by such as the Greek physician Hippocrates of Cos, who fathered modern medicine in the fifth century BC. The extent of the Ancient Egyptian doctors’ knowledge of medicine is set out in two docutments, the New Kingdom, Eighteenth Dynasty (c. 1570 BC) Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus1 and the contemporary Ebers Medical Papyrus,2 wherein cases of injury are discussed and anatomy is mixed with prescribed treatments and speculative medical philosophy. The skills of the Ancient Egyptian doctors gave them important positions in the courts of the pharaohs, and clay tablets found at Tell el Amarna recount how the courts of Syria, Assyria and Persia employed royal doctors from Egypt.

The importance of royal doctors grew out of the need to keep a sovereign well, so that his realm or empire could be properly governed and kept in good discipline. There were always plenty of candidates for the throne if a monarch were incapacitated by disease or mental illness, so the position of trusted, loyal royal doctors became an important court prerogative.

The concept of a ruler having a personal physician dates back to around the Archaic Period of Ancient Egypt, within the era of the First Dynasty (3200–2980 BC). One so identified is Sekhet’enanach.3 Among his tomb hieroglyphics the physician appears dressed in leopard skins and carrying two sceptres. The text records that ‘he healed the king’s nostrils’, and had his work immortalised in a sculpture of the healed royal patient.4

Among medical historians a better known royal physician’s name is that of Imhotep. As magic extended to all aspects of daily life in Ancient Egypt, Imhotep became the prototype Magician-Physician of the ancient world.5 He began to be worshipped as a god around 2850 BC.6 As Imonthes, the Greeks identified Imhotep as equal to their own Aesculapius, whose cult was established by 850 BC.7 By the time Aesculapius’s cult had been absorbed into the culture of Ancient Rome, in the third century BC,8 Imhotep had become ‘Patron/Tutelary Deity of Medicine’ to Aesculapius’s ‘Emblemetic Deity of Medicine’.9 We know that Imhotep served also as Grand Vizier to King Djoser of the Third Dynasty (2778–2680 BC), for whom he designed the great 200ft high Step Pyramid at Saqqara, some 14 miles south of Cairo.10 Three temples are known to have been built in honour of Imhotep’s skills, at Memphis, Thebes and Philae,11 where his amulets could be bought to fight off disease and his cures sought by incubation (a sleep-over at the temple).

COURT DOCTORS OF THE PHARAOHS

The stela set up as a false door in the tomb of Ir-en-akhty of the 1st Intermediate Period (2280–2050 BC) shows the number of royal doctors the Ancient Egyptian court of the period supported. The hieroglyphs and transliterations of some of the doctors (swnw) can be set out thus:

swnw per aa: court physician

sehedj swnw per aa: inspector of court physicians

swnw irty per aa: court opthalmologist

swnw khet per aa: court gastroenterologist

neru phuyt: proctologist, a practitioner dealing with the diseases of the anus

aaa mu m-khenu netetet: interpreter of liquids

It may be noted that there were women royal doctors at court, an example being the Lady Peseshet of the Fifth–Sixth Dynasty (2563–2423 BC), described as ‘overseer of the female physicians’.

Examples of hieroglyphs as used by court doctors on prescriptions, requisitions, or instructions:

Far from Egypt, medicine in China’s royal circles began at about the same time with Emperor Shen Nung, who flourished both as a pharmacist and as a medical amateur. Astonishingly, his famous Pen Tsao (Great Herbal) remained in print until 1911. The tradition of emperors as doctors was carried on by Hwang Ti (2650 BC), believed to be the author of the volume Nei Ching (Book of Medicines), which contains remarkable comments on the circulation of the blood – years before the English physician William Harvey (1578–1657) made his discoveries known in 1628.12 Thereafter Chinese emperors employed doctors within their courts, although medical practice remained steeped in magic and sorcery for centuries. By the eighteenth century the Chinese imperial court was a great fount of medical knowledge. During 1744 the Ch’ing Emperor Ch’ien-lung (r. 1736–96) became patron of the forty-volume standard encyclopedia of Chinese medicine, The Golden Mirror of Medicine.

The practice of medicine in Japan followed tenets derived directly from China. Early Japanese doctors were skilled in the treatment of sword wounds, in consequence of the activities of both retained and itinerant samurai (warriors) within the Japanese feudal state. Contact with western doctors at the Dutch enclave at Nagasaki from the seventeenth century enhanced their knowledge of surgery and anatomy, and gave them an insight into general western medical techniques. Many of Japan’s leaders in the field of medicine were trained in Germany by the beginning of the twentieth century. Magic played an important role in Japan when medical attention was required at court. As the bodies of the imperial family were deemed sacrosanct, no doctor could touch them, let alone give them injections.13 Full medical treatment was not allowed in the imperial Japanese household until 1928 when at the age of 2 Princess Sachiko, second daughter of the Emperor Hirohito and Empress Nagako, developed a mortal illness.14

It was Hippocrates of Cos (460–355 BC), the most celebrated physician of the ancient world, who helped to separate magic from medicine and stimulated scientific enquiry into the practice of medicine. Since the days of Croesus, last King of Lydia, court physicians had communed with the gods to perform ‘miracles of healing, even restoring the dead to life’ with the intervention of Aesculapius.15 Hippocrates extracted the medical facts from the superstitions these physicians uttered at the Delphic Oracle, and new medical protocols were evolved and written up in the Corpus Hippocratium.

The spirit of Hippocrates and his immediate followers was passed on to doctors within the empires of Alexander and Rome. Alexander III ‘the Great’ (356–323 BC), King of Macedonia, maintained the Greek custom of having personal physicians at court, and in 332 BC there was established the medical school of Alexandria, led by Herophilus the anatomist and Erasistratus the physiologist. By a gradual process of infiltration the medical system of Greece was transferred to the Roman Empire. Up to 46 BC, when Julius Caesar granted physicians full rights of Roman citizenship, medical men, most of whom were Greek, were of low degree, many being slaves in Roman households. Within the imperial cadres of Rome, doctors were employed only on an ad hoc basis.16

One physician who certainly won Roman imperial favour was Galen (c. AD 131–200), whose expertise laid the foundations of experimental physiology and dominated medical thought for some 1,200 years. Galen studied medicine at Alexandria and became a court physician to Emperor Marcus Aurelius. Thereafter court physicians began to be mentioned within a distinctive role; one such was the Byzantine scholar Oribasius, physician to Emperor Julian the Apostate.

As Christianity developed as a theological dogma, medicine went into decline, with disease now being looked on as a divine punishment for sin. Bigoted early Christians regarded miracles as the only true healing agent, and disregarded medical practice. Furthermore, as the body was deemed sacred, and dissection of it anathema, the study of anatomy and physiology could not be pursued practically, but only in the volumes of Galen. Although this attitude was to change within the medieval Church, the dawn of Arabian medicine added greatly to the expansion of therapeutic knowledge in the Middle Ages. The courts of Syria and Persia pioneered the use of court physicians skilled in medical practice, their knowledge gleaned from the old Greek texts, now translated into Arabic. Soon, too, court physicians became famous for their expertise, like the Syrian-Christian Jibra-il-Bukht-Yishu, personal physician to Harun Al-Raschid, the famed Abbasid Caliph of the Arabian Nights.

Encouraged by the intense activity within the Arab world, court physicians flourished and the works of such men as the ninth-century Egyptian-Jew Isaac Judaeus, physician to the rulers of Tunisia, remained in print until the seventeenth century. The youngest known court physician of the era was the Persian Abu Ali Hussein ibn Sina, by-named Avicenna (980–1037), whose book Canon of Medicine was set reading up to modern times.17

As the western Caliphate (including Spain) achieved its own political importance, by the twelfth century Arabian physicians were influential in Europe; one such, the Cordova-born Moses bin Maimon, known as Maimonides (1135–1204), became court physician to the sultan of Egypt and Syria, the celebrated Saladin (1137–93). In 1191 a great army of crusaders, headed by the monarchs of France and England, captured the city of Acre on the Bay of Haifa, and Richard I (1157–99), King of England, is said to have invited Maimonides to be his royal physician, although he declined. Yet Maimonides was to achieve lasting literary fame, as many historians believe that he was the inspiration for the character of the physician El Hakim in Sir Walter Scott’s tale of the crusades, The Talisman (1825).

Court Physicians Come of Age

As the Moslem Empire declined, the gilded days of Arabian medicine passed and a new era of medical practice evolved from the ashes of the western Roman Empire, to be dubbed ‘monastic medicine’. That the secrets of the ancient medical practitioners should have passed into the grasp of the Church is not startling. The ancient works of the Greek masters of medicine had been retained, copied, illustrated and translated in every monastic scriptorium in Christendom. Further, it was a tenet of the Opus Dei for each monastery to take care of the sick in the convent’s infirmarium, with a brother as infirmarius and another as hortulus (gardener) for the herbarium. Monastic physicians were encouraged to come to court and such men as the Dark Age ruler King Theodoric of the Ostrogoths (454–526) actively promoted monastic care for the poor. By the eleventh century, then, medicine had become largely the exclusive right of the Church in Britain, with Physic joining Latin Grammar and Classical Philosophy as one of the monastic Humanities.

The Pipe Rolls of the Exchequer, Patent Rolls and Close Rolls held at the Public Record Office give details of the holders of royal preferment as medical attendants to the English royal houses, whereas the chronicles, registers and cartularies of Britain’s medieval monasteries tell of monkish royal physicians. One of the earliest mentioned is Baldwin (d. c. 1097), Abbot of the Abbey of St James, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk. A native of Chartres, it is likely that he studied medicine at the famous cathedral medical school there and he is chronicled in the documents of Bury St Edmunds Abbey as court physician to Edward the Confessor (r. 1042–66), of the House of Cedric and Denmark.18 When this line was replaced by the House of Normandy, Baldwin became physician to William the Conqueror (r. 1066–87), joining Brother Nigel, who was already in the conqueror’s suite and was one of the first recipients of royal largesse for medical attendance.19

Another man made wealthy through royal medical service was Gilbert Maminot, Bishop of Lisieux (d. 1101). The first personal physician to William’s queen, Matilda, he is known to have attended William after he was injured in 1086 at the sacking of the garrison of Mantes (during William’s laying waste of the French Vexin).20 The chroniclers William of Malmesbury (in his Gesta Regnum Anglorum) and Matthew Paris (Chronica Maiora) both concur in describing the activities of the royal physicians Baldwin, Nigel and Bishop Gilbert at William’s deathbed. They record that at Mantes William’s horse, ‘in leaping a trench burst the bowels of the rider. Much disabled . . . his physicians, on being called, they declared after an examination of his urine that his death was inevitable.’ William was further examined and treated at the Priory of St Gervais, Rouen, then known for its skilled medieval brethren, taught by men such as Guntard, Abbot of Jumièges. William is likely to have ruptured his urethra, for which no surgical repair was available; he died on Thursday, 9 September 1087 and his bloated corpse was buried at the Church of St Stephen, Caen.21

During the eventful reign of William II (r. 1087–1100), John de Villula (d. 1122), Bishop of Bath and Wells and founder of the monastery of St Peter and St Paul at Bath, became the official royal physician, this post being combined with the role of chaplain to the royal household. De Villula restored the Roman hot springs at Bath and is said by some – based on very little evidence – to have lived on long enough to give medical advice to Henry I. The unpopular William Rufus, by the by, met his death from a crossbow bolt while hunting in the New Forest. Most historians aver that he was murdered.

Of all the Anglo-Norman monarchs, Henry I, ‘Beauclerk’ (r. 1100–35), the youngest and only English-born son of William I and Matilda of Flanders, ‘enjoyed the company of medical men, sought them far and wide, and rewarded their special services’.22 The Pipe Rolls of Henry’s reign show that he had eight prominent physicians severally at his court, although data on them is sparse. There was Ranulf, a monk of the Cluniac priory of Montacute, Monmouthshire, who also served as royal chaplain. He took the title Ranulfus domini Henrici Regis medicus. Clarembald, Canon of Exeter (and London; d. c. 1133) was another royal physician and chaplain, who made a study of the medical miracles said to have taken place at the Cathedral of St Peter, Exeter. He was also physician to the powerful prelates Bishop William Warelwast and Richard de Beaumaris, Bishop of London. Another chaplain to Henry I, Nigel of Calne, Wiltshire (c. 1107–1230), is also mentioned as a physician, along with the Spanish layman Pedro Alfonso (fl. 1062–1142), a Christian convert from Judaism who served at the court of King Alfonso of Aragon; he was at Henry’s court around 1100–21. Another physician was Serlo of Arundel, a secular clerk at Waltham Abbey who had served as physician to Adeliza of Louvain, Henry I’s second wife, from 1136 to 1160.23

Perhaps the most celebrated of Henry I’s physicians were Faritius and Grimbald. Faritius, Abbot of Abingdon (d. 1117), was a native of Arezzo in Tuscany, and held the post of cellarer-infirmarer at Malmesbury Abbey. He was also principal physician at the court of Henry I’s first wife Matilda, daughter of Malcolm III of Scotland.24 Grimbald (d. c. 1138) also originated in northern Italy and served as Henry’s travelling physician both in England and in Normandy from 1101. As with most of his colleagues, Grimbald was proud to proclaim his royal prerogatives and was another of the king’s medici who served as religious advisers and bureaucratic agents. Grimbald was thought to have been with Henry I in France and was present at the monarch’s death.

Henry I was not the first sovereign to ignore his physician’s advice. On 1 December 1135, at the prodigious age of 67, Henry was at Lyons-la-Forêt in Normandy. Returning from the hunting field he sat down to a favourite feast of lampreys (a type of eel), and almost immediately became ill with a fever and vomiting followed by a rapid death. Determined to exonerate themselves, the royal physicians present attested that they had warned the king not to gorge himself with lampreys. Today doctors believe that Henry did not contract a supposed fatal food poisoning but actually succumbed to peritonitis.

The court of King Stephen (r. 1135–54) produced no medics of note, yet physicians like the little-known Iwod and Ernulf are identified as witnesses to royal papers. Stephen also may have died from peritonitis, for Gervase, monk of the Priory of Christ Church, Canterbury, wrote: ‘The King was suddenly seized with pain in the iliac region, along with an old discharge from haemorrhoids.’25

Henry II (r. 1154–89), the first of the House of Anjou, also has shadowy physicians like Johannes and Radulfus listed in the Pipe Rolls as medicus. Ralph de Bellomonto has a longer mention in the Court Rolls, as he was drowned off Normandy in 1171, when the royal fleet came to grief in a storm. Henry II was a very active man, and chroniclers do not identify him as a sickly individual, although he did share the Plantagenet manic-depressive curse. He is said to have died of a ‘lingering fever’.

When Henry’s successor Richard I, ‘Coeur de Lion’ (r. 1189–99), took part in the Third Crusade with Philip Augustus in 1191–2, he took with him Ranulphus Besace (d. c.1243) as his personal physician, while another prominent royal physician, John de Bridport (c. 1178–1215), remained at court in London and Normandy. Richard I died from a wound received at the siege of Châlus in Poitou. Gervase of Canterbury recorded his end: ‘The king was fatally wounded in the left shoulder by an arrow in such a way that the bolt, driven down from the shoulder, reached the neighbourhood of the lung or liver, nor could it be checked by any skill of the physician.’ It appears that Richard died from septicaemia.

The Pipe Rolls of King John (r. 1199–1216) identify both Master Alan and Matthew Macy (practised c. 1200–18) as physicians to the king, but little is known of the former. The chronicler Matthew Paris avers that John died of gluttony after ‘indulging too freely in peaches and copious draughts of new cider’. At his deathbed at the castle of Newark-on-Trent, on 19 October 1216, John was attended by the physician Abbot Adam of Croxton, Leicestershire. Abbot Adam subsequently dissected the king’s cadaver, a procedure that had its technical roots in Ancient Egypt. John had long wanted to be entombed at Worcester Cathedral, between the shrines of St Oswald and St Wulstan, so Adam removed the king’s internal organs and preserved them in salt. Thus, he believed, the body would be less corrupt for its journey to Worcester. John’s heart and viscera were later buried at Croxton Abbey.26

During the reign of Henry III (r. 1216–72), we begin to glean from the Court Rolls more details about the rights, duties and status of royal physicians. Throughout medieval society, physicians were deemed to rank between canon lawyers (those learned in the laws of the Church) and civil lawyers. Surgeons were deemed low-life. Julius Leopold Pagel describes them thus: ‘illiterates – barbers, sorcerers, landlords, tricksters, counterfeiters, alchemists, bawds, go-betweens, midwives, old women, converted Jews, Saracens – all those who have foolishly squandered what they have and proclaim themselves surgeons so that they can make a living, hiding their wretchedness, poverty and lies under the cloak of surgery’.27 In what might be called the ‘pre-professional age’, and certainly within court circles at this period, the distinction between medicine and surgery was hardly observed. Yet physicians kept themselves aloof from ‘the butchers’ who performed surgery; and for those with a surgical background a court appointment was a rich, plum job. Henry III’s Court Rolls show that trusted medics received annuities, ecclesiastical benefices, wood from royal forests and fish from crown fishponds.

The Calendar of Patent Rolls shows that Henry III built up a strong medical staff at his court, although he appears to have lived a reasonably healthy life for the time and he lacked the symptoms of ‘Plantagenet manic-depression’. These records also show that a very early recipient of the title ‘Surgeon to the King’ was the cleric Master William, who flourished at court during the period 1233–54.28 In 1233 he was presented with the living of Haukerinton, in the diocese of Lincoln, establishing the custom of Henry bestowing ecclesiastical properties on his medicus regis with generosity. In 1241 William’s contemporary, Master David, was granted one hundred escheats of land in Ireland for his medical services to the king.29 In 1243, the year of his death, David was also given land that had formerly belonged to one John of Kaerdiff (Cardiff).30 Henry III made further provision for David’s widow, Mistress Alice, whereby she was given three obolus in 1248 by way of an early example of a widow’s pension.31

In 1251 Henry de Saxeby (c. 1250–71) appears as ‘Serjeant-Surgeon’, a new title for the royal appointment,32 with an annual fee by 1253 of ten pounds sterling.33 This surgeon also received ex-judiciary land in Ireland to the extent of ten liberates.34 Henry III expected his medical staff to work hard to earn such largesse and we are told that Henry de Saxeby ministered to seven workmen who were injured when a wall fell down in Westminster Hall during renovations.35 Nevertheless the Close Rolls in particular show that Henry de Saxeby was one of the best paid and most richly rewarded of all the royal appointees, who, together with surgeon Sir Thomas de Weseham (c. 1252–72), saved the king’s life. De Weseham, by the by, was perhaps the earliest instance of a physician being knighted for medical service. The British Library preserves a rare prescription of the physician Roger de Lacoc (d. 1233), who seems to have treated Henry III for an eye infection. The prescription details treatment with an ointment of fennel, rue, musk and attic honey.36

In 1253 Henry III made his second expedition to Gascony, which had fallen to Aquitaine in 1052 and to the English Crown when Henry married Eleanor of Provence in 1252. Among his entourage were the royal clerk and physician Ralph Necton, Henry’s saviour Sir Thomas de Weseham and the physician Patrick de Carliolo (Carlisle). Sir Thomas, by the by, was to rise to greater heights in gifts of royal property: in 1255 he was given possessions in Colchester that had been sequestered from the usurer Isaac the Jew; in 1256 he received a bailiwick of the Forest of Cannock; and by 1260 he had been granted the right to mint his own coins.37 This allowed Sir Thomas to live in prosperous retirement until around 1281.

It may be noted that Henry III founded a separate medical staff for his queen consort; Eleanor’s entourage included Peter de Alpibus, Raymond de Bariamondo and Nicholas of Farnham, professor of medicine at the University of Bologna, and later Bishop of Durham. In 1255 Queen Eleanor became anxious about the health of her 15-year-old daughter Margaret, wife of the 14-year-old Alexander III (r. 1249–86), King of Scotland, and her physician Reginald of Bath was dispatched to investigate. Matthew Paris recorded that Reginald observed Margaret’s ‘melancholy and pallor’, which evidently derived from the repressive way in which she was treated by the Scots courtiers. Reginald berated the young couple’s Scots guardians, who had even denied them a matrimonial bed. Alas, Reginald was soon seized with a severe illness and died; some said he was poisoned by the Scots for his outspokenness. Later that year Henry III visited Scotland ‘to put things right’.

Education, Disease and Court Roles

By the end of the twelfth century more up-to-date knowledge was coming from the medical schools at Montpellier, Bologna and Salerno, while several of the court physicians were graduates of Paris. This meant a significant shift in who was being employed at court. In Norman and early Angevin times it is clear that most medical practice was carried out by monastic personnel, but as the houses of Normandy and Anjou declined, non-practising clergy and non-clergy appear in the lists of court medics. Slowly the quality of medieval knowledge was improving, but throughout the Middle Ages medicine was taught as a philosophy and little practical expertise was offered. Surgery was taught by apprenticeship in the houses of barber-surgeons, whose novice attendants were called garciones.

Most poor folk relied on herbal medicines and made pilgrimages to saints’ shrines to cure their ills. Many suffered from malnutrition, which often led to deformed or crippled limbs, impaired sight and skin diseases. Poor hygiene also contributed to the nation’s ill-health, as did exposure to the wet and cold climate, which exacerbated rheumatism and arthritic disease.

Physicians and surgeons at court were presented with patients who were better fed and housed, but by the reign of Edward I (r. 1272–1307) medics were able to isolate the possible causes of particular diseases, encouraged by a better quality of medical education on the curricula of Oxford and Cambridge colleges. Royal doctors of the period had to cope with eight diseases in particular: gastro-enteritis, endemic in the Middle Ages, largely because of the insanitary conditions; smallpox, another scourge of medieval times; measles, scarlet fever and diptheria, all fatal diseases at this time; tuberculosis, both of the bovine (through milk products) and human (by airborne droplet infection) forms; plague (typhus, typhoid and bubonic); and venereal diseases.

Although Edward I’s court was always adequately staffed by prominent physicians like William of York and William of St Père, perhaps influenced by his father he encouraged certain royal physicians to take an interest in the medical needs of his war machine. Certainly Philip de Beauvais (c. 1279–c. 1320), son of the royal surgeon Simon de Beauvais (c. 1276–90), was present during Edward I’s initial campaigns in Scotland in 1296, and is referred to as cirurgicus regis. De Beauvais tended the king’s wounds – including fractured ribs – at the House of the Knight’s Hospitallers at Torphichen, West Lothian, after the Battle of Falkirk, 22 July 1298, where he was joined by another royal physician, John de Kenley.

For his campaign in Galloway in July and August 1300, Edward I had with him de Kenley, de Beauvais and a physician identified as Peter of Newcastle. The Liber Quotidianus Contrarotulatoris Garderobae38 tells us that both the surgeon and the physician received two shillings per day, equivalent to the fee of a knight, and Peter one shilling, the fee of an esquire. The Liber also speaks of clothes allowances and free sustenance while on campaign. Each senior medic was attended by two valetti (junior assistants) and two socii (associates). Taken ill at Carlisle, Edward I was attended by the royal physician Nicholas Tingewick (c. 1291–1339), described as ‘the best doctor for the king’s health’.39 In his medical bags Tingewick carried turpentine, aromatic flowers, carminatives, electuaries and various ointments.

Both Edward I’s mother Eleanor of Provence and his (second) wife Princess Margaret of France had their own identified personal physicians. William le Provençal came to Britain in Eleanor’s entourage, while John de Fontaines treated Margaret for measles in 1305.40

After Edward’s death at Burgh-by-Sands on 7 July 1307, his son Edward II (r. 1307–27) continued the Scottish campaigns, leading to his defeat at Bannockburn in June 1314, and the last Scots expedition of August–September 1322. This campaign reveals one snippet of interest in the study of doctors in royal military service: contemporary documents show that the king’s surgeon Stephen de Paris had his own baggage-horse carrying panniers of drugs and instruments.41

The Calendar of Patent Rolls for Edward II’s reign lists Adam of Southwick, Albert, John, Nicholas of Corwenne (in Scotland), and Robert de Sidesterne as royal doctors; the latter had been in the king’s suite since his days as Prince of Wales. Yet in Edward II’s reign it seems that, just as the Roman aristocracy had done, English monarchs used physicians from outside the court on an ad hoc basis, the reputation of these doctors being enhanced by peripatetic royal patronage. One who benefited was John of Gaddesden (c. 1280–1361), Professor of Merton College, Oxford. He had learned his skills almost entirely in England, although some scholars aver (on little evidence) that he was once a student at the medical school at Montpellier. In his great work Rosa Anglica Medicinae, Gaddesden describes how he treated the little son of Edward II, John, Earl of Cornwall, for smallpox by wrapping him in a red cloth, within a room hung with red curtains, in a bed with red counterpane. It is thought too, that Geoffrey Chaucer immortalised John of Gaddesden in The Canterbury Tales as the ‘Doctor of Physick’. In ‘The Prologue’ to the Tales Chaucer mentions Gaddesden by name, lists well-known medics of the day and gives an overall description of what folk might think of contemporary doctors:

A Doctor too emerged as we proceeded;

No one alive could talk as well as he did

On points of medicine and of surgery,

For, being grounded in astronomy,

He watched his patient’s favourable star

And, by his Natural Magic, knew what are

The lucky hours and planetary degrees

For making charms and magic effigies.

The cause of every malady you’d got

He knew, and whether dry, cold, moist or hot;42

He knew their seat, their humour and condition.

He was a perfect practising physician.

These causes being known for what they were,

He gave the man his medicine then and there.

All his apothecaries in a tribe

Were ready with the drugs he would prescribe,

And each made money from the other’s guile;

They had been friendly for a goodish while.

He was well-versed in Aesculapius too

And what Hippocrates and Rufus knew

And Dioscorides, now dead and gone,

Galen and Rhazes, Hali, Serapion,

Averroes, Avicenna, Constantine,

Scotch Bernard, John of Gaddesden, Gilbertine.43

In his own diet he observed some measure;

There were no superfluities for pleasure,

Only digestives, nutritives and such.

He did not read the Bible very much.

In blood-red garments, slashed with bluish-grey

And lined with taffeta, he rode his way;

Yet he was rather close as to expenses

And kept gold he won in pestilences.

Gold stimulates the heart, so we’re told.

He therefore had a special love of gold.

Edward II’s horrific death is worthy of note as it was far beyond the skills of his royal doctors to avert, either in cause or in effect. In 1327 Edward II had been forced to resign the throne and was in the custody of Thomas de Berkeley and Sir John Maltravers at Berkeley Castle. There, said the historian Ranulph Higden in his Polychronicon: Cum veru ignito inter celanda confossus ignominiose peremptus est. (He was ignominiously slain with a red-hot spit thrust into the anus.)

Three royal doctors stand out in the service of Edward III (r. 1327–77). One of them, Jordan of Canterbury (d. 1361), served the royal house for some three decades and was present in August 1346 when the king and his son Edward, the Black Prince (1330–76), inflicted their terrible defeat on the French at Crécy. For this Jordan was awarded a war purse of 109 shillings.44 His colleague, the surgeon Roger de Heyton (d. 1349), showed so much loyalty and devotion to the king that he was gifted land and property.45 The third was Adam Rous (d. 1379), whose will is preserved, showing he was a prominent property-holder who left a number of buildings to the Augustinian Priory of St Bartholomew.46 It is likely that Rous was an alumnus of the medical school within the priory, founded by the Frankish prebendary of St Paul’s, Rahere (d. 1144), and which later developed into St Bartholomew’s Hospital, West Smithfield, London. Jordan, de Heyton and Rous are mentioned most frequently in the Calendar Rolls because of their accumulation of property from royal service, but Edward III and his queen Philippa of Hainault had a staff of a dozen more medics, including the ‘Doctor of Medicine and Master of Medicine’ Godfrey Fromond (c. 1335–51). When on the continent the king was served by extra-surgeons like the Irishman William O’Hannon, who is known to have treated the monarch’s young son Prince Lionel (d. 1368).

A search through the state papers of Edward III reveals that some of his doctors, like John Bray, went on to serve Richard II. One of the Black Prince’s personal surgeons was his protégé John Arderne (fl. 1370), one of the most capable practitioners of his day; another was the surgeon Adam de la Poeltrie. The king’s daughter Isabella, Countess of Bedford (d. 1382), had a ‘personal physician for her lifetime’ in William Holm, who received £10 per annum for his services.